Image Source: The Verge
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has launched what he calls a culture reset aimed at stripping bureaucracy, flattening hierarchies, and restoring a scrappy, startuplike urgency across the company. The push touches everything from return-to-office rules to management layers and performance metrics as leadership tries to recapture Amazon’s early “Day One” energy.
Key Highlights
• Strategic reset: The cultural changes are framed as a deliberate reset to accelerate decision-making, reduce friction and drive higher accountability across teams.
• Office policy: Amazon has reinforced return-to-office expectations, moving toward more in-person collaboration as part of the broader cultural push. 
• Management trimming: A flattening of the organisation includes cuts to middle management and tighter manager-to-direct-report ratios to speed execution.
• AI and jobs: Jassy has signalled that widespread AI adoption will change the company’s headcount mix, with efficiency gains likely to reduce some roles while creating others.
• Measurement changes: Performance reviews and promotion criteria are being realigned to tie more closely to Amazon’s leadership principles and measurable impact.
Context and What Changed
• Why now: After pandemic expansion and a period of looser operating norms, Amazon’s leadership says complexity and layers have dulled the company’s default speed. The reset aims to remove “soft” bureaucratic processes that slow experimentation and resource allocation.
• Concrete moves: Expect stricter meeting discipline, refreshed role clarity, a “bureaucracy mailbox” or similar feedback channels to flag processes that should be cut, and new expectations for daily contribution and team rhythm.
Voices From Inside and Outside
• Leadership view: Executives frame the changes as necessary to compete in an era of rapid AI adoption and tighter capital discipline — a pivot from expansive experimentation to focused, profitable bets.
• Employee reaction: Reaction is mixed. Some employees welcome clearer accountability and faster decisions; others are worried about job security, loss of flexibility, and the cultural cost of stricter office and performance rules.
Why It Matters
• Talent market impact: Strict RTO and high accountability can make recruiting and retention harder in competitive talent markets where flexibility is prized. How Amazon balances rigor with employee experience will shape talent flows.
• Operational leverage: If executed well, fewer management layers and clearer metrics could materially boost productivity and margins per employee, an important lever for earnings growth.
• AI inflection: The way Amazon integrates AI — reassigning people to higher-value tasks while automating routine work — is a bellwether for how large tech firms will remap work in the coming years.
Risks and Execution Challenges
• Overcorrection risk: A swing too far toward rigidity could dampen innovation, discourage risk-taking and erode the creative serendipity startups rely on.
• Implementation load: Policy changes are easier to announce than to operationalise; success requires middle-management buy-in, careful change management and concrete support for transitions.
Next Steps to Watch
• Follow-through on AI plans and how headcount evolves as efficiencies materialise.
• Measures of success: near-term KPIs likely include decision cycle time, product release cadence, employee engagement scores and productivity per full-time employee.
• Talent signal: watch hiring patterns, voluntary turnover, and external recruiter activity for real-time feedback on how the market views Amazon’s new culture.
Closing Thought
• Jassy’s reset is a classic corporate moment: an attempt to trade scale’s comforts for the scrappy discipline of a founder era. The tightrope is real — done well, the reboot could supercharge Amazon’s next growth chapter; done poorly, it could hollow out the creative risk-taking that made the company a pioneer.
Sources: Business Insider, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fortune
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